


Keep Me from Getting to You, Babe

by SylvanWitch



Series: Ain't No Mountain High Enough [10]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Biting, Bonding, M/M, Magic Made Them Do It, Marriage Proposal, Unrepentant Filth
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-16
Updated: 2017-12-16
Packaged: 2019-02-15 09:17:30
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,514
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13027947
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SylvanWitch/pseuds/SylvanWitch
Summary: Magic makes them do it.  Sort of.





	Keep Me from Getting to You, Babe

**Author's Note:**

> I didn't label this dubcon because our intrepid heroes are totally okay with the outcome...one might even say anxious to revisit the situation, sans magical roofie. Even so, it's still a "...made them do it" trope, with some uninvited bonding thrown in for good measure, so if that's not your thing, you may want to skip this one. 
> 
> The title is taken from Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell's terrific "Ain't No Mountain High Enough," though I did add a comma to this line.

Steve felt like he’d never been so far inside of Tony before, and it wasn’t enough, not even close.  Tony’s head was up against the headboard, his neck at an awkward angle, and Steve had bent him in half, shoving his knees almost to his ears to get closer, closer—

 

Still not enough.

  
Tony was grunting, a rhythmic “uhn—uhn—uhn” sound that tweaked something in Steve every time.  He was out of control, his thrusts erratic, hips pistoning under their own volition, almost, as if he couldn’t stop even if he wanted to.

 

Fuck, he didn’t want to.

 

The backs of Tony’s thighs streamed with sweat, and it was hard to keep a grip on them, keep them pushed upward to spread that tight ass wide.  Tony’s hair was soaked as if he’d just come from the shower, but the shower where this had started had been hours or days ago.  Steve had been here forever, suspended just on the cusp of orgasm, his cock engorged, hard to the point of pain and suffering at this point from friction burn.

 

He didn’t remember the last time they’d had lube.  The crumpled tube was caught under one of his knees, pressing a sharp ridge into the flesh there, but he was too close to pay attention to it, too caught up in chasing his need.

 

Beneath him, Tony winced in time with Steve’s thrusts, but when Steve had last had the wherewithal to pull away—was it even today?  Yesterday?—Tony had whined, a high, back-of-the-throat animal noise that had driven Steve even wilder, until he was brutalizing Tony’s ass, grunting low and hard with every thrust, driving Tony until Tony couldn’t breathe for the angle of his neck, until his face was red with exertion and oxygen loss, until a stinging shower of chemicals brought Steve back to himself a little, pulling away from Tony so suddenly that there was an obscene pop and Tony cried out and Steve lunged to one side to be sick noisily on the floor and not on the wreck of the bed where Tony was gasping for air and moaning with every exhale as if he were dying, as if Steve had killed him by pulling away.

 

Sour bile coating his tongue, Steve tried to say, “Stop,” meaning Jarvis, but instead he said, “Tony,” and crawled back on top of him and slid inside, and Tony screamed and spread his legs and sobbed, “Pleasepleasepleasepleaseplease,” and Steve gripped Tony’s cock, stripping him and saying, “C’mon,” harder and harder, his own cock aching and unfulfilled, the chemical shower still pounding them, Tony’s eyes closed against it, head turned toward the bed to breathe something other than the stinging, unnatural rain, and then suddenly, with no warning, Steve was coming, a scalding stream pounding out of him, and Tony was screaming again, pain and pleasure indecipherable as he painted his own belly, his neck muscles cording, head thrown back, teeth clenched against the exquisite agony.

 

When Steve finished, he slid from Tony, and they both whimpered.  There was blood mingled with Steve’s seed where it seeped from Tony’s abused hole—and blood mingling with the milky pool on Tony’s belly, too, and Jarvis said something Steve couldn’t hear over the blood thunder in his head, and then Tony was reaching for Steve’s flaccid cock and squeezing, and it hurt, holy fucking shit, it hurt, and Steve moaned and grew hard and let Tony guide him right back where he’d been, and Jarvis was still shouting, but Steve was beyond hearing, and then things went dark.

 

The first thing Steve noticed when he came back to himself was the wretched taste in his mouth.  His tongue felt dense and swollen, taking up his whole mouth, and he tried to ask for water, but nothing came out of him but a wheezing sound, which nevertheless got the necessary result, a blessed chip of ice melting like a miracle, sending a trickle down his throat that set his gullet on fire.

 

He retched repeatedly, trying to lean up and turn his head but finding that he was restrained, and then he began to struggle in earnest, a thin ribbon of bile dragging from his chin, his nose streaming, too, his eyes, everything purging from him at once as he grunted against the chest strap and the wrist restraints.

 

Distantly, he thought someone was shouting, but Steve was so focused on how he was bound to the bed, helpless, so caught up in a sense memory that he couldn’t pay any attention until hands on his shoulders pressed him forcibly back and he stared wildly around to find his attacker and saw instead Clint, who was saying something, something like…

 

“Easy, Cap, you’re okay.  We’re gonna get you out of these, alright?  You just gotta promise not to go after Tony.  Can you do that?”

 

Only half of Clint’s words made any sense to him, but Steve nodded—he’d have agreed to almost anything to be let up—and when the pressure was off, it was only Clint’s hovering that told him something else was going on.

 

“What?” he started to say, and then he caught a whiff of Tony—sweat and gear grease and blood and semen—and he sat up and tried to shove Clint aside so that he could get down from the bed and go to Tony.

 

Clint prevented him, said, “Steve, wait, you’re not your—,” and then Steve was pushing with both hands and Clint was falling back and then Steve’s feet stopped working and his whole body juddered and the last thing he saw was the floor coming up to meet his face.

 

The next time Steve woke up, he thought that there was gauze over his eyes, but when he went to wipe it away, he discovered that there was nothing there.  His vision was blurry.

 

No, that wasn’t it, either.

 

The room was on fire.

 

Steve strained against the chest restraint, craning his neck wildly, trying to find Tony, and when he laid eyes on him in matching restraints in a bed across the room, he started to strain harder, trying desperately to get to him.

 

“Take it easy,” Clint said, appearing through the growing haze. “There’s no fire.  Nat’s burning sage.”

 

He said this like Steve should understand it, but he might as well have been speaking in Farsi for all Steve took in.

 

“What?”  Steve was still wrestling with the wrist restraints, pulling mightily against them, but there was no give at all, and he couldn’t get any real leverage.

 

“You’re under some kind of chemically-induced spell, Bruce thinks.  He suggested the sage.  It might help dissipate the magic, but it will definitely keep you from scenting Tony and going apeshit again.  Sorry about having to tase you, by the way.”

 

Steve took a deep breath, eyes still fixed on Tony’s still form.  “Is he okay?”

 

“He’s fine.  We sedated him.  Something we can’t do to you, apparently.  Well, we could…”  Clint let that trail off, the implications unpleasant.  Steve wasn’t paying much attention, though, all his focus fixed on his lover.

 

“Did you t-touch him?”  Steve asked it through clenched teeth, a roaring red rage having torn through him the moment Clint had looked at Tony.

 

“Hey, woah,” Clint said, putting both hands up, palms-out.  “I know that’s the spell talking, so I’m going to let it pass, but trust me when I say that I am not hitting that.”

 

Steve growled, a long, low, ragged sound that carried around the room.  Across the way, Tony stirred in his sleep. 

 

“C’mon, Cap, don’t make me tase you again.  You won’t be able to watch over him if you’re unconscious.”

 

Very little really got through of this to Steve except that he was being threatened with separation from Tony if he didn’t do as Clint asked, so he stopped growling and reduced his struggles with the wrist cuffs, though he couldn’t seem to help the occasional vicious tug against them.  He was running on instinct, the tiny, screaming voice of reason in his head almost entirely suppressed by the urge to cover Tony’s body with his own.

 

“Hey!”

 

Steve’s eyes snapped to Clint, threat level amped, and Clint said, “Knock it off!” which was when Steve realized he’d started making a low noise in the back of his throat again.

 

He shook his head and took in a deep, cleansing breath.  It had the opposite effect of calming him, though, because he caught smoke on the back of his tongue and started choking, and then in the middle of that hacking, wheezing mess, he scented Tony.

 

It was like…coming home after a long day of fruitless searching…or walking down an endless, dark road and seeing a light in the far distance, knowing its warm red beacon was for him alone.

 

Something of his higher consciousness started to push through the red haze of lust and need, and Steve gasped, “Tony?” through a swollen throat, and he couldn’t breathe, could hardly speak, but what breath he had he spent on “Tony?” And then a moan from across the room stopped even the spasms in his heaving chest and the world went perfectly still to Steve, as if the walls and beds and monitors and Clint and everything had disappeared, and it was just the two of them, alone and forever in a clean white space where nothing could ever get at them again.

 

Some niggling warning wormed frantically at the back of his skull, but Steve ignored it for the warm wash of _lovemeaningbelongingpurposehome_ that buoyed him up, carrying him out and away from the physical need ravaging his body.

 

He saw them as if from outside of themselves and the room—Tony a perfect, beautiful light shining like a promise, his own body shrouded in a roil of stormcloud grey, at its center a seething red eye of animal, atavistic lust.

 

He didn’t want to return to that flesh cage, didn’t want to be only the sum of his savage human parts.

 

He wanted this—Tony’s light a glowing wonder, tethering him in the ether, their love made perfect in a single, gleaming beam of hope.

 

As Steve watched, ants swarmed into the space below and surrounded him, something frantic and unsettling in their movements.

 

The ants began to work frantically at that red center that had once been his heart and that seemed to dim with each passing moment until it was a mere afterimage of itself, a grim negative against the dissipating grey smoke that seemed to vanish as his heart stopped.

 

“Hey!”

 

Steve didn’t want to search for the beckoning voice.  He wanted to fix his whole being on Tony’s light and stay there above it, entwined in its silver tether, floating and free of all instinct except this—to worship and love and be loved in turn.

 

“Hey!”

 

But the voice was insistent and it pricked at his peace until he turned his gaze toward the figure standing apart from the mess on the bed that had been Steve.

 

Distantly, he recognized someone he’d once known, and as he watched, the figure approached the bed and hammered a closed fist into the fading red center that was even now disappearing for good.

 

It pulsed and Steve felt a bolt go through him, heaviness and discomfort flooding his senses.  He tried to protest the treatment, tried to say, “No, I don’t want to go back to that,” but he found that in his present form he could not make himself heard.

 

The figure—Clint, he now knew—struck him again, a colossal blow against his chest, and he felt himself falling, a precipitous plunge that threw him back into himself with a painful, wracking gasp.

 

Clint slapped him for good measure, and through the pain-tears and panting, Steve managed a squinty-eyed glare in response.

 

Clint grinned unrepentantly.  “You deserved it for pulling that shit on me.  You’re just lucky Tony’s still out of it, or he’d have done a lot worse.”

 

Steve realized all at once that the driving need was gone from him, that he no longer wanted to tear Clint apart for being in the same room as Tony.  That he didn’t have the annihilating desire to fuck Tony until they were a seething, bleeding mess that knew nothing but _wanthavedevour_.

 

A little part of himself that he’d only later take out and look at more closely was disappointed that the need was gone, but the largest share of Steve was relieved to have control again.

 

Then he remembered the abuse he’d put Tony through even as his own body began to signal that abuse.  A particular part of him was especially sore, and he closed his eyes, wincing at the steady, throbbing burn of it.

 

“Whatever magic it was seems to have overridden most of your self-preservation instincts,” Clint said, observing Steve’s discomfort.  “You’ll be okay, though—no permanent damage.  To either of you.”

 

A question occurred, and before he could consider how ungrateful it sounded, Steve blurted, “Why are you in here, anyway?  I mean, why no doctors?”

 

Clint chuckled, a dark and not really humorous sound.  “You don’t remember knocking Doc Carmody on her ass, huh?”

 

Steve winced and shook his head.  “She okay?”

 

“Yeah, sure, though I wouldn’t want to be you next time you need a blood draw.  Anyway, after the third time you broke a restraint trying to kill someone from medical for touching Tony, they called me in, figuring maybe you’d be better with a friend than a stranger.  I said ‘fuck that’ and got out the restraints Tony made when he was trying to figure out a way to keep Bruce from going green.  Turns out they work pretty good on super-soldiers.”

 

Steve considered said restraints.  “Take ‘em off?”  It was a request, and it might even have sounded a little like pleading, but he didn’t care.  They invited unpleasant memories, and he really needed to see for himself that Tony was okay.

 

“Alright, but if you do anything stupid, I’m going to tase you again.  And I’m gonna like it.” 

 

“Got it.”

 

The shock of the cold floor on his bare feet helped Steve focus on the immediate here and now, to cool air on his torso and bare legs drawing attention to his mostly naked state, welcome distractions from the back-brain panic running commentary about Tony’s condition.  While he couldn’t remember every moment of their frantic coupling, the strobic snapshots he could recall were shooting tendrils of electric alarm through his veins, and Steve needed to see and feel for himself that Tony was alright.

 

Even so, he approached the bed slowly, almost reluctantly, partly afraid that he’d be overcome by mindless lust again and partly because he didn’t know if he could handle the evidence of that mindless lust painted in livid bruises across Tony’s body.

 

Still, he wasn’t a superhero for nothing, and though he felt far more like a pathetic ten-year-old than a grown man in charge of his faculties, Steve took his fear in hand and reached Tony’s bedside.

 

There were dark pools beneath Tony’s eyes, and beard-burn made a red rash along both of his jaws.  His lips were swollen, the upper split at the corner, and Steve could make out just above the loose hospital shift the perfect imprint of teeth where Tony’s neck met his shoulder.  The mark was swollen and angry-looking, and he found himself swallowing hard, both because it made him a little sick and also a little hot—he could recall the need roaring through him, the feel of that thick muscle between his teeth and the way Tony had screamed and dug at his back with his nails and pushed Steve deeper inside of him with a tilt of his hips.

 

Steve cleared his throat, trying hard to ignore the tightening low in his belly.

 

“How long has he been—?”

 

“The ‘event,’ as Jarvis refers to it, started around 0800 yesterday morning.  In the shower, apparently.  He wasn’t really alarmed until later, though, when things got more…intense.  He alerted us around 1800, but we weren’t sure what was at play, and we were afraid that separating you might cause you both some sort of harm.  Fury called in an occultist who thought there was, uh, alien magic involved, and then we put in a call to Jane, who got word to Thor.  Anyway, we put you down the first time around 2300 last night, after Jarvis unleashed the fire retardant system on you.  It’s almost noon now.  Apparently your heart stopping broke the spell, though I have no idea what caused you to stop breathing.”

 

Steve could have a good, long freak-out over that later, maybe.  Right now he had other concerns:  “What’s the damage?” Steve managed, though his throat was tight.  He was sure that if he pulled back the sheet protecting Tony’s modesty he’d find a lot more such marks as the ones he could see now.

 

“Nothing permanent,” Clint soothed.  “He’ll be sore for a few days, but he’ll recover.  You didn’t really hurt him.  Hurting didn’t seem to be the, ah, primary goal of the spell.”

 

Clint’s diffidence drew Steve’s attention at last away from Tony.

 

“What aren’t you telling me?”  Steve was too tired and heartsick to be menacing, but Clint seemed wary anyway, which only made Steve more concerned.  Uneasiness began a queasy tango in his stomach.

 

Clint hesitated for long enough that Steve began to imagine worst case scenarios.  He was up to “Congratulations to the new fathers!” cake art when Clint said, “Thor didn’t recognize the magic—it’s not Asgardian or anything from his ‘realm,’ as he put it.  He suggested we check on a homegrown witch.  He did say that there might be, uh, residual effects.”

 

Steve could tell from the careful way Clint was picking his words that however Thor had put it would have alarmed him more. 

 

“Don’t go easy on me,” he ordered, squaring his shoulders and putting his chin up, unconsciously assuming parade rest, which still had the effect of centering him even after all this time out of the army.

 

“He thinks that the whole, uh, biting thing?  Might be a sign that the spell was meant to attach you two.  Um, possibly permanently.  Maybe.”

 

Steve wasn’t sure what expression he was wearing, but it must have been alarming, because Clint plunged on, words blurring together as he rushed to finish his explanation, “Like a kind of magical marriage or something, you know, nothing, uh, dangerous or, uh, uncomfortable, just…”

 

“Permanent.”  Steve said it flatly, both stunned and strangely disappointed—not that he might be permanently bound to Tony but that he hadn’t been given the chance to make that choice himself—kneeling on a checkered blanket beside a picnic basket, producing a ring from beneath the cold chicken or from inside a red velvet cupcake or something.  (Not that Steve had ever given it much thought, of course.)

 

“D’we get accidentally married?” Tony asked a little groggily from the bed where he’d been momentarily forgotten in the shock of Clint’s revelations.

 

Steve turned back to him, overcome in a rush by a host of feelings that made him worry for just a second that he had been caught up once again in the lust spell.  Then he sifted the love from the concern from the desire—natural, not magically induced this time—and realized what he was feeling was only a variation on what he always felt when he looked at Tony.

 

He took Tony’s hand, brushed a kiss across his knuckles and his knuckles gently across an abrasion on Tony’s jaw.

 

“I’m sorry,” he murmured, leaning down to ghost a kiss across his forehead.  “So, so sorry,” he repeated, dropping the lightest of kisses on each of Tony’s closed eyelids.

 

“C’mere,” Tony demanded, gripping Steve’s neck with surprising strength, given his recent unconsciousness, and pulling him down for a kiss that had nothing to do with accepting Steve’s apology.

 

“We’re doing all of that again real soon when I can remember exactly how I got these love marks,” Tony said when he let Steve up.  Tony’s lips were red, his cheeks flushed, eyes gleaming with wicked intent, and Clint cleared his throat and might have said something about going, but Steve wasn’t paying any attention.

 

Tony’s pink tongue was worrying the scab on his lip, and Steve was fascinated by the rush of new blood just under the old and the way he could almost taste the metallic tang of it in his mouth.  He thought it should upset him, but it definitely didn’t, and he might’ve been bothered more except his shorts were a little tight and Tony’s hand was doing something truly perverse, given their current location in the heavily monitored S.H.I.E.L.D. isolation ward, and he suddenly wanted nothing more than to shove Tony over and crawl in beside him and lay there side by side for about a hundred years or until Tony’s hand finished what he’d started.

 

Instead, Steve gathered the tattered remnants of his control and stepped out of Tony’s reach, only keeping a hand on his bare shoulder, rubbing his thumb repeatedly over a bite mark there in a way calculated to distract Tony from his immediate purpose.

 

“St-stop,” Tony managed an infinity later.  He was panting a little and had his eyes closed, his hips making tiny circles against the tented sheet.

 

“You first,” Steve said, but he pulled his hand away, contenting himself instead with touching Tony’s wrist, surreptitiously checking his pulse while also enjoying the contact.

 

“So—married, huh?”

 

Steve shook his head.  “We don’t know that.”

 

“Don’t sound so relieved,” Tony answered, his voice carefully neutral.

  
“I’m _not_.  I mean, I _am_ , but not like you mean.  That is, I—”

 

“Try not to break something, Boy Scout, I’m only teasing.  I get it—you want the whole shebang, white dress, flowers, horse-drawn carriage, photos in Central Park, reception at the Plaza. You’d look stunning in taffeta, and I’d kill it in an Armani tux.  All our friends there, Nat with tears in her eyes, Bruce giving you away.”

 

“Yeah,” Steve said softly, after a pause that had drawn out into something more. 

 

“Okay.”

 

“What?”

 

“You’re asking me to marry you, aren’t you?”

 

“No!  I mean, I want to—I will, when, you know—.  Just not like—.”

 

“Like what?  Like with a picnic basket and a fake cake with a ring inside?”

 

“How did you—?”

 

“Please, I know you better than you know yourself.  I ordered a Shetland wool checkered blanket last week.  It should be here by now, actually.  I’ll have to ask Jarvis.  Jarvis,” Tony called in the general direction of the stunningly uniform S.H.I.E.L.D. ceiling, because of course Tony had infiltrated the world’s most secure facility with his personal AI, “did the pack—?”

 

“Stop,” Steve said, putting his hand lightly over Tony’s mouth, which might have been a strategic misstep if he intended to prevent Tony from distracting him because Tony’s hot, wet tongue insinuating itself between his fingers did nothing to focus Steve on the subject at hand, which was marriage, the proposing thereof and/or magical condition in which they’d found themselves.

 

He pulled away hastily and said, “Tony,” in as stern a tone as he could manage given the fact that he was wearing only tented boxers and a chest blush.

 

“Steve,” Tony mocked back, putting on a ridiculously exaggerated frown that made Steve’s sternness turn into something the approximate consistency of runny pudding.

 

Steve dropped his head toward his chest in defeat and put his hands up in surrender. 

 

“Look, I know you’re disappointed that we’ve been magically accidentally married—although I don’t think we can technically claim that status for tax purposes.  I think we at least have to run it by a mail order minister—but it doesn’t change anything, really.  I love you.  You love me.  Together forever or until the arc reactor runs out of juice, right?” 

 

Tony shrugged, causing the sheet to slide further down his torso and drawing Steve’s eyes to the perfect twin crescents surrounding his right nipple.  Steve had a sudden, visceral memory of putting them there, and he made a noise in the back of his throat before he could stop it.

 

“Hey,” Tony said.  “That’s not magic, right?  I mean,” Here he waved his hand in the general direction of Steve’s raging hard-on, “Not to insult your, uh, little soldier or anything.  Just—you’re not under the influence of a spell right now, right?”

 

“Right,” Steve answered, though his voice was hoarse, and he had to clear his throat twice to say it.

 

“And I’m not suffering the effects of a magical roofie here—,” and with this he made an expansive gesture in the direction of his own equally obvious erection.

 

“We do this to each other because we love each other and we’re good together and it feels amazing to have you buried balls-deep inside of me and hear that sound you make when you first drive home, that sort of  ‘unh’ sound, like surrender and homecoming and wonder all at once?”

 

Steve made sort of the same sound just then.  He wasn’t sure the S.H.I.E.L.D.-issued boxers were going to stand up to much more abuse.

 

“Yeah, that one,” Tony said, a little smug now, and Steve loved it. 

 

“So what d’you say to getting the hell out of here to someplace with a bigger bed and higher thread-count sheets so we can make a mess of each other and then maybe eat something and plan our ‘dream wedding’?”

 

There might’ve been sarcastic air quotes around the last part of Tony’s suggestion, but Steve thought it all sounded good, so he nodded and went looking for clothes and shoes and maybe a member of the medical staff to sign off on their release before Tony did something precipitous involving his suit and the walls of the building. 

 

“You can’t—,” tried the nurse and then the doctor and then the two security personnel who stomped into the room in grim succession.

 

But Steve moved them aside—gently in the case of the two former, less so in the case of the latter two—and there was a private car waiting for them at the curb (of course) and cold French champagne in an ice bucket (naturally) and a single, long-stemmed red rose on white leather seat between them (what else?).

 

Tony slid close and licked the bubbles from Steve’s mouth, and the window between them and the driver went suddenly opaque, and let’s just say the ride from the medical facility was long enough for them to determine that, in fact, the boxers S.H.I.E.L.D. issued were no match at all for the combined forces of Tony’s singular focus and Steve’s nail-driving desire.


End file.
